President Joe Biden‘s administration just agreed to a five-year extension to the science and technology sharing agreement with China. Established by President Jimmy Carter, the agreement has attracted increasing scrutiny in recent years because of China’s endemic use of U.S. scientific knowledge to bolster its military and intelligence services.
Biden has made a bad decision by extending this agreement.
The main problem here is that China views its access to U.S. science and technology through the fixed prism of one key interest: specifically, how that knowledge can be employed to boost the power of the Chinese Communist Party. And that includes Beijing’s key concern of increasing China’s military power. China has used this agreement to manipulate otherwise civilian technologies for military and other nefarious purposes. While the State Department insists this extension comes with new safeguards to address these concerns, China’s malfeasant interest in using scientific engagement to undermine U.S. interests is long-standing and deeply problematic. At the margin, this agreement is contradictory to U.S. security interests.
Some members of Congress recognize as much. Rep. John Moolenaar (R-MI) chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, condemned the decision. He observed that “renewal of the STA in the final days of the administration is a clear attempt to tie the hands of the incoming administration and deny them the opportunity to either leave the agreement or negotiate a better deal for the American people.”
China is far more content.
As a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman put it Monday, “Scientific cooperation between China and the US benefits both sides. … The extension of the agreement is an important move to follow up on the common understandings reached between the two presidents when they met. The extension is in the interest of both peoples, and what the international community hopes to see.”
This is hot air of a kind that only the most devoted Communist Party apparatchik could believe. But the risks to U.S. security aside, there is another concern that deserves attention here. Namely, the question of what message this extension sends to allies such as France, Australia, South Korea, and the United Kingdom. All these allies are keen to increase their technology engagement with China to win new Chinese investments. The only reason that they are proceeding cautiously on this front is that they know the United States is deeply concerned with China gaining access to new military-enabling technology.
Allies fear that the U.S. will retaliate against its own interests if it gets too close to China with tech sharing. By extending this agreement, however, Biden essentially sends the message that the U.S. isn’t all that concerned with such tech sharing. He thus undermines the incoming Trump administration’s ability to persuade allies to restrict their own tech sharing with China.
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After all, those allies will now be able to say, “If you’re willing to extend technology sharing with China, why shouldn’t we?”
Put simply, this is a foolish decision made at a particularly inauspicious moment. It reeks of short-sighted arrogance and a desire to complicate the incoming president’s foreign policy.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
